The Mother of All Questions Audiobook By Rebecca Solnit cover art

The Mother of All Questions

Preview

Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Mother of All Questions

By: Rebecca Solnit
Narrated by: Tanya Eby
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $14.61

Buy for $14.61

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national best seller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In her characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and sharp insight in these 11 essays.

©2017 Rebecca Solnit (P)2017 Tantor
Comedy & Humor Gender Studies Witty Comedy Nonfiction
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about The Mother of All Questions

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    85
  • 4 Stars
    24
  • 3 Stars
    6
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    2
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    57
  • 4 Stars
    21
  • 3 Stars
    11
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    71
  • 4 Stars
    11
  • 3 Stars
    6
  • 2 Stars
    2
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

words (and the way they’re pronounced) matter.

i’ve downloaded many books recently read by narrators who egregiously mispronounce alarming numbers of words. this plea- to make it stop- goes out not only to the narrators in question, but to whomever is in the booth. kindly get a clue. IT’S A FREAKING AUDIO BOOK. IT’S KIND OF THE WHOLE POINT.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Great discussion on power and gender

Liked this work and the author so much. Excited to listen to the first two installments of this trilogy.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

run on and on and on and on and on sentence.

there are rivers that meander less then this endless argument that completely dilutes a valuable topic. what may I ask is the authors point? we run from gun violence to a man with a uterus in so many paragraphs with out addressing a thesis. I came to this book to better understand the female condition within the context of our current culture. I have one hour left and I am no better educated on the topic.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Rambling, SWERFy, Dated

I found myself annoyed pretty quickly by Solnit's stream-of-consciousness style. Some people might very much enjoy all the poetic-sounding musings loosely connecting a wide variety of personal and pop-culture events, but I found myself frustrated by the vagueness of points she was making. Her ruminations on "silence," for example, keep changing the definition of silence in a way that made it difficult for me to assess what point she was trying to make. It seemed at times to be a free-association exercise.

This wouldn't have bothered me so much if her work fell purely into the categories of poetry, memoir, or creative expression, but she also makes serious arguments about contested issues. Her commentary on porn and prostitution (her word) is a prime example. Sex workers' rights is a very important topic she knows to be divisive. Get as poetic as you like about the nature of male violence when you know everyone is pretty much on the same page, but when you're outlining an argument that porn isn't actually speech I think you owe it to your feminist audience to be crystal-clear on your position.

Solnit's poetic and rambling style provides her cover to avoid accountability when she strongly implies, for example, that young women who watch porn aren't prepared to fend off sexual assault, and that the sex workers leading the sex workers' rights movement are white and middle-class with no experience of coercive working conditions. (She doesn't say this directly, she implies it by mentioning that she knows a few sex workers who are white and middle class and not coerced before reminding us that trafficking does exist - as though her sex-worker friends would need her to explain this.)

Ultimately, her Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism is why I gave her work two stars, but I will add that many of her pop-culture analyses have NOT aged well. It was funny in a sad way when she praised the great male feminists Aziz Ansari and CK Louis, for example. I gave an audible groan when she described the final reckoning against Bill Cosby that surely proved the progress feminism has made. Maybe if she had any friends in the sex industry with experience being poor and nonwhite and familiar with workplace coercion (or if she weren't so eager to erase such knowledge from sex workers she does know) she would have known better than to believe everyone who calls themselves an ally.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!